Re: Keyholes vs. Missing Features

At 01:51 PM 10/13/2003, White Wolf wrote:
>necessarily a gratiutous (I copied that word) one.  Internet Explorer
>showing maximum 11 elements in a dropdown is a gratiutous keyhole - since
>the designer has picked an arbitrary number, instead of providing dynamic
>size with reasonable effort.

It's certainly a keyhole.  To determine whether it is gratuitous, we'd have
to figure out how hard it would be to dynamically size the visible portion
of the list.

>Another note: As I am going deeper into HTML/content rendering I start to
>see that (unfortunately) since HTML does not support columns (like
>newspapers have) it rather seems a non-gratiutous keyhole when people
>present fixed width web pages.

No.  Eliminating fixed-width pages is trivial (as I described in my draft
chapter) and eliminates the keyhole.  That may lead to readability
problems, but a readability problem is not the same as a keyhole.  

>IMO what we have "found" here is a need to add columns to the HTML/XHTML/CSS
>standards.

I don't see that the "need" for such a thing has been established.  At any
rate, such a feature would address the "page too wide to be easily readable
by people who for whatever reason don't make their window narrower"
problem, not the keyhole problem.

Scott